Frances Kleven:  Welcome to The Learning Signal, brought to you by LearnUpon, a podcast for learning leaders in the agentic era. I’m your host, Frances Cleven, Senior Director of Customer Success here at LearnUpon. 

We’re kicking off our first season by diving right into some massive shifts in the learning industry. AI isn’t just reshaping the way we work, it’s having a massive impact on every corner of how people learn. To help us make sense of it all, we’re joined by two leaders right at the center of this evolution. First, we have LearnUpon CEO Brendan Noud, who’s been at the helm of LearnUpon since 2012, but also with a 25-year career in learning, so has had a front row seat to changes across all different eras of learning and development. 

We’re also joined by LearnUpon’s VP of product, Caroline Hynes. Caroline has a massive experience with companies such as Zendesk. She also has done a stint in Hollywood, earning her an Emmy, so delighted to have her as part of our deep bench of entertainers in these podcasts. 

Today, we’ll be tackling some big questions together. How is agentic tech changing the way we learn, the role of learning in organizations, and the way we build learning products in LearnUpon? And also why AI sometimes isn’t the magic pill that we all fantasize it to be. 

All that and so much more, so let’s dive in. 

Well, welcome Brendan and Caroline to The Learning Signal, our LearnUpon podcast series. Brendan is the co-founder and CEO of LearnUpon, and Caroline is our VP of product. I’m delighted to have them both to join this conversation that we’re calling Macro Shift, around our Agentic Learning Platform, but really around this tension between artificial and intelligence, so really excited to get both of your thoughts on that. 

I know it’s something that we’re discussing a lot internally, but I know every organization, every company is also having this conversation, so a little window into our discussion here at LearnUpon, but we know that it’s a conversation that most people in the working world will relate to. 

I wanted to get us started with just some warm-up questions, but I actually think that this is how a lot of us started learning about AI and thinking about AI. So I wanted to ask you: what’s the AI tool that you currently use most often? That could be in your personal life or in your professional life, and sort of what is the impact that it’s had on your day-to-day, either on a macro or a micro level? 

 

Brendan Noud: For me, well, the one I’m in and out of most is Gemini, which we’ve rolled out across LearnUpon, and it’s definitely had a big impact just on the speed at which I can get things done. And just been even, like, a pretty messy inbox at best of times. That’s probably just finding and just being able to have summaries of things and to-do lists. It’s been a big plus for me. The other one more recently, I’m also big—again, just for that speed of findings—is SlackBot, which, only last week, you know, when you have… “I’ve seen this before. There was something in a channel”. Even if I found the right channel, after so long, and going back, was it a month ago or was it six months ago? I literally found what I was looking for in 15 seconds using SlackBot, and it was brilliant. It gave me what I need, and I just moved on with my day. So… yeah, so they’re my two favorites. What about you, Caroline? 

 

Caroline Hynes: So definitely SlackBot, especially after any kind of PTO. It’s a really nice way to catch up.

 

Frances Kleven: And, sorry, what’s your process when you come back from holiday? I know you just did. Like, what are you asking SlackBot for? What are you looking, what do you want from it? 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, so I’m kind of looking for anything that has urgent dates, thematic pieces around… especially around the product or product asks or customer feedback, so that’s where I start there. I’m starting to experiment with Claude as well, so we recently got access to that while the team have been working with it a little bit longer than I have. And then personally, I use, I guess two things with regularity. I guess consciously use it. We’re using AI all of the time in product not necessarily consciously. I use ChatGPT for a lot of… if I’m looking to do a recipe or training plans, or just sanity check something. I use it like a coach in a lot of ways. And then I use the AI in Strava actually to assess my runs and what I can do a little bit better. So yeah, so that’s all.

 

Frances Kleven: And for those tools that you’re using in your personal life, were you an early adopter, or were you sort of cautious about that and started seeing people use them and started seeing people with Strava or other things? Were you immediately “Yes, I’m in for that,” or did it take you a while to get there?

 

Caroline Hynes: So, I probably was an early adopter when ChatGPT first came out, I was using it. I wasn’t using it as heavily as I use it now, and I think it’s almost replaced, like, my first sort of go-to for a lot of things which actually surprised me when I started thinking about it. And with the Strava, I was all over it because I’m not the fastest kid on the block, but, you know, I have a bit of pride. So wherever I can make improvements, and the Strava AI is telling me, “Well done,” or “What happened?”, it’s interesting. 

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. Brendan, what about you? When we rolled out Gemini, were you an early adopter, or did it take a while? You knew it was there, and you knew there were efficiencies there, but it takes time to… and you feel like it disrupts your work, and you don’t have time to adopt. Were you immediately, “I’m in. I know how to use this”? 

 

Brendan Noud: No, I think it took me a while. I think it’s that thing, at the start, you feel like it’s disrupting your day ’cause you have a routine and I think it’s breaking the routine that you’ve built up over years. “This is what I always do to manage my day or to work through my day”. And you’ll try something out and you’re learning something new and you have to kind of rewire a little bit. But like that, once you get into the habit of it, then it just becomes like it’s the go-to. So yeah, I think that’s for me. Even now I’ve found, ’cause there’s so many tools as well. ChatGPT back in the years, but now because I use Gemini in work, I’m kind of using Gemini outside of work as well. And like that on the personal side. The big one recently: we were planning our vacation with our family. So we’ve a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, and the difference where we ended up, again, I used Gemini, but I gave it the details of what Katie was interested in, what Connor was interested in, what myself and Grace were interested in. And it just came back, so quickly, with just different options from your typical Google search. 

 

Frances Kleven: Brendan, interesting that you said Gemini for travel planning. That’s my holdout. I really enjoy the thinking through travel planning, and I’m not willing to hand it over. But Caroline, you mentioned something earlier about not wanting to lose sort of the human thinking or the critical thinking, and so when you think about the tech that you use, how are you making decisions of “This is really something that I wanna use my brain for, and this is something I want to outsource?” 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah. A little like you, that deep thinking is really important to me. I don’t want my brain to stop functioning. So I think there’s the everyday tasks, the repeatable tasks, the add-no-value tasks, things you have to get done. That’s a no-brainer for me. But what has been interesting for me, I’ve kind of gone on my own little evolution around this and whereas before I was like, “No, I have to do all this thinking myself because I want to use my brain.” And now a little bit like, “Well, why don’t we just partner?” Not because I’m any lazier—and that’s a big thing for me, I don’t wanna be lazy in my thinking. It’s because can I elevate what I’m thinking and refine my thoughts and challenge me a little bit more? So that’s I guess how I’ve evolved with this. 

 

Frances Kleven: And then coming up from that, how do you think then, you know, you lead a product team. Brendan, you’re leading a company. How do you then think of what you want your workforce to be doing in a world where there’s so much — those repeatable tasks — that can be done, but there can be outsourcing to sort of critical thinking type things. So if you’re thinking about the future of your teams, what is it that you want them to be spending their time doing? 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, so I think for me, those repeatable tasks, no-brainer. I think creating space for collaboration and accelerating research and lots of time with customers, and being able to, not just research our product, but research the market — that’s where the value is. And bringing in our own nuance into it and layering that in is really, really valuable. So that rapid prototyping, how can we experiment faster? But I think what’s really equally as important is around distraction, right? Because there is a lot of AI tools, there is a lot of newness, shiny things all of the time. And I think it’s about how do you play quickly, learn quickly, adopt the right thing, and then stop looking left and right and just keep going forward and getting the work done I suppose. And I still, like, it’s really important to me that the team get joy out of the work that they do, like, they don’t feel that they’re just there working with an AI companion, that they have their teammates, they have debates, they challenge each other, and that’s still so important, and that they feel the value that they’re bringing to the product as well, and they can see their fingertips over it. So I think it’s striking that balance of being efficient, being expedient but, you know, people are so, so, so important, and they’ll always bring something that a machine cannot. So that’s kind of how I approach it. 

 

Brendan Noud: Yeah, it’d be similar for me, from a LearnUpon company perspective. I think it’s getting that balance right between, like, with the AI tooling out there, we can do more, we can move faster. And I think right from the start of LearnUpon, with myself and Des, that was the thing we loved. We could move so quickly. When we were a two-person company, and we could finish each other’s sentences, you could fly and really do things fast. And it’s a natural evolution as you scale up and you’re over 300 people. You know, there is more process in place, and there’s things, or the collaboration can take a bit longer. You’ve a way bigger customer base, a way more complex product. So as a founder, I think it’s one of the things I would get frustrated that we can’t move quickly enough on things. 

So I see the AI tooling now as an accelerant. And I think that’s in our teams, that everyone wants to do more. Every year we look at what — you know, myself and the leadership team — we’d always talk about the things we didn’t get done. And I’m always like, “Well, we have to look at all the things we didn’t get done.” I think that’s how we’re getting through things really quickly, which is exciting. But also I think that creativity is really important. And Caroline touched on it, not getting too distracted by the noise, ’cause I see across all our teams, requests will come in for this tool, that tool, and at some point you have to just, like, “Okay, we’ve got a good tech stack here, let’s go execute. Let’s go bring value to our customers. Let’s help LearnUpon have a bigger impact across our organization.” 

And the other thing for me with just the AI tooling is, again, how much you outsource, how much is our IP and our creativity. You don’t want to become average. And I think the AI tooling out there, it is the average of what’s out there. And that’s where I would always try to encourage our teams to, you know, we’ve been at this a long time. We’ve a lot of really smart, passionate people across the business, and I don’t want to see our team lose that, you know? And our customers bring that to the table as well. So if the AI tooling we have across the business frees us up to have more time and more calls with customers, that’s massive for me. 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, and I think you touched on there, we are very intentional about how we use AI in our product and where we leverage it, and I think how we bring that intentionality into our own practices and our own workflows is something that we’ve been good at, but it is important. 

 

Frances Kleven: And then how are you communicating that, especially to your team on the product side of… we have a lot planned for AI innovation and a lot of expectations in the market of what AI tools look like, and then how do you message that to your teams? Where you find the balance between sort of the AI automation piece or the agentic piece, and what needs to be human, either things that they’re working on or things that need to be human in our product? 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, I think the product team are pretty much aligned with that always. But it’s always encouraging the team to kind of self-check and hold themselves accountable because at the end of the day, whether it’s generated by a person or whether it’s generated by AI or it’s co-generated, you’re responsible for what we’re putting out into the world. We’re responsible for the product that we build. We’re responsible for our customers, and so I think it’s having that ownership and accountability, remaining curious and remaining fast, but we know we are the guardians of the product that we build. So that’s kind of the tenet, and when you’re coming from that place, it’s kind of easy for people to hold themselves to account. 

 

Frances Kleven: And then Brendan, I mean, you’ve been in this space for a long time. You built a company and a learning management system, and so have thought a lot about learning and learning in the workplace. And I think there’s always been sort of threats to that to say, you know, what does workplace learning look like, or what is the need for that? But the exciting piece around the AI transformation has been — and I think you said this — of there is more need than ever for learning in the workplace, and it’s almost… I think we always said it was critical, but I think now you can really point to it as critical for the survival of your business, that there’s upskilling there. And from top leadership down to individual contributors, that’s now on job descriptions. That’s now an expectation of roles. But then in that, for the learning professionals, so for the person who had spent their day working in a learning management system, creating content, what does that role look like for them now when there’s so many opportunities to automate things, there’s so many opportunities to outsource that sort of day-to-day work or even content creation? What does that person’s role now look like? 

 

Brendan Noud: Yeah, so I think it’s evolving and certainly as more and more capability comes in terms of learning technology, like platforms like LearnUpon, I think where you spend your time is evolving and that’s the big thing. We’ve talked a lot about this history of human evolution and the biggest shifts always were the kind of people had more time in their day, and then it’s where they directed that time. And that led to the next kind of wave of creativity and innovation. And so we’re thinking about that now. And from my perspective, I think if you’re a learning professional — and in LearnUpon we’ve been talking about this idea of being elevated up from an LMS administrator that’s been around for 25, 30 years to being a learning architect. And for me, that’s… When we think about LearnUpon and our Agentic Learning Platform, we talk about this idea of personalized learning at scale, but what is that? It’s really knowing who your learner is. And so what are their current skill sets? What are they working on? Their role, their background, all of that context. And I think if you’re a learning architect, how do we connect our Agentic Learning Platform to the right sources of profile information for our learners? So whether that’s our HRIS, whether it’s Slack, whether it’s MS Teams, whatever it is from an employee perspective, or whether it’s your CRM, Salesforce, HubSpot, if it’s from a customer perspective, for example. 

So actually really thinking about how can I get the full complete picture of who my learners really are at an individual level. And then thinking about how we can close those skill gaps of where they need to be to be successful in their role. And that’s the bit we’re trying to bring together. And so I think there’s lots of opportunity. And we hope working with our customers we’ll get to see them doing this real time, and we’ll actually get to see, “Look what this customer did, look how they brought this extra insight about this learner in”. And we were actually able to deliver learning in the moment that really had an impact. I think the other area for us is proving the impact of learning, so actually, again, using that context and real business results, whatever it might be, performance-based data, to be able to see that and go, “This learning drove that result.” And closing that circular loop is… I see that as where the future of L&D… that’s where they need to spend their time and actually start to see what’s really happening across their organization. 

 

Frances Kleven: I mean, it’s interesting. It’s an exciting opportunity, but it leaves a, in some ways, a scary gap, I think, for some learning professionals. It might have taken you a month to put together a report to show a correlation between your customers completing courses in your learning management system, and the correlation between that and retention. That would have been five or six different spreadsheets, even if you could get all the data, and probably a good couple weeks crawling through that data to come up with some insights. Now, that’s a two-minute query in Claude to say, “What is the correlation between course completion and retention?” But then the gap, or the next level, is then what do you do with that information. And I think admins haven’t had the time to then say, “Actually, we aren’t seeing the correlation we want to see, so we need to make adjustments there.” 

And so that is, Caroline, for you, as you’re thinking about our product, where there was a need to deliver data through reports and exports and API, but now that can be done so quickly. And so how do you think about, then, what insights we need to help customers be able to see and understand and ultimately action? 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, so I think that’s the big shift. It’s that insight and helping identify the next best step or the next best action. And also looking at cohorts and saying: similar companies, similar sizes have implemented this or changed this and had this impact. That’s what’s the real evolution on the reporting side of things. But I think what’s interesting about what you talk about between how long it took to run a report and get those insights and that gap, it’s also an opportunity when we have that information to kind of move and pivot how organizations view L&D teams from being almost like a cost center to really a revenue-driving center, and being able to show that potentially greater confidence over the data and the action plans around that. So I think it’s really powerful, not just from an opportunity for admins to kind of really accelerate and become more strategic, but actually for the business overall and the impact that L&D is gonna be able to have. 

 

Frances Kleven: And it has been always so challenging to get those insights because they usually did require data from other sources in the business, and it was generally quite complicated to do that. You either needed to have really expert Excel level skills to be able to pull together that data or an IT team who was willing to build a data lake or to build those integrations. But I think for learning it does now allow business leaders to look into those learning programs and ask some hard questions that they now have immediate insights into of what value is this bringing us. 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, you would’ve heard me say before that reporting is one part of an L&D’s role, right? It’s not their job, data mining, expertise, and as you say, this actually transforms that because it takes out all the joins, all the data mining, and brings up the insights, which is the real power. And I think being able to do that in LearnUpon and being able to do that in another system using the LearnUpon data, whether it’s Claude or another LLM that you’re hooking up to is really, really impactful. 

 

Brendan Noud: I think as well, you touched on it there, Frances, but it’s the speed. In the past, to get that kind of data and reporting and to go over and ask whoever you knew in IT to do you a favor to give me the CRN data or whatever it is. 

 

Frances Kleven: And maybe as a one-time favor. 

 

Brendan Noud: Yeah. Exactly. So all of that, and if that was four or five weeks, the reality is — and you might get some insights in — but things are moving so fast now. If it’s customer education, the products are changing all the time, so that data is probably out. It’s out of date, whereas now we’re actually in this real time, or close to real time circular motion where we can say “This piece of microlearning went to this learner or this cohort of learners at this time, and here’s the results on the business”. And I think that’s what’s really exciting, and just to think of the format of that learning, the modality of it. All of those things, instead of maybe having some guesses and assumptions, I think we’ll be able to make tighter relationships between… Here is this learning delivered through this channel in this way at this time, we know has a positive impact. 

 

Caroline Hynes: And to your point, too, when it’s not working, we can agentically change it or update it or have that human-leading-the-loop there. Whatever is preference. So I think that’s the power as well. You don’t have to go through long cycles to update the content that’s not performing or courses that aren’t operating well. 

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. In the sort of discussion that we’re having around intelligence versus automation, I’m thinking back to this conversation we all had with a customer who was here on-site with us who said, “Hey, I’m kind of intrigued by avatars. I’ve been looking out in the market, and avatars have piqued my interest, but I’m a little reluctant on them.” And I love that moment, because both of you looked at each other across the table and you could tell that there was a difference of opinion there. But I wanted to touch on that here, where that came from and what that debate is. Because it’s very much for our customer, it was a debate that they were having internally in their learning team of what would avatars provide for our team, and is it something that would be impactful to the business, or is it something that’s just a bit of hype? And I know Caroline, you had a very cringey reaction to it. 

 

Caroline Hynes: I had a very visceral reaction to it. I believe my exact phrase for that poor customer was, “I find them creepy.” So yeah, so that was really interesting ’cause I do kind of find them creepy. And it goes back to my premise of the importance of humans and humans in the process. 

 

Frances Kleven: And was there one that you saw that was creepy?Like, when it came to mind, did you have something that you thought of? 

 

Caroline Hynes: It’s just, the creepiness comes from me, is that you can’t tell if they’re real or not. That’s what really is a mind-meld for me. I’m just like “Is this a real person? Is it not?” ‘Cause they’re so good, right? Because the quality has improved so much. But it was interesting in real time to have, I mean, you’ll hear me say all the time, strong opinions loosely held, to have my mind opened by the customer explaining a potential use case. And I was like, “Oh, that makes sense. I can see how you could apply it in this,” and it wasn’t creepy in that situation. But having the application to it, and yeah, so I was like, “Oh, yeah, I really understand now why, how you could apply it in a way that’s meaningful, impactful, cost-effective for your team but then allows the human to step in and carry on the conversation”. And that, to me, I think is where I felt the rub most, was like, “This should be a human conversation”. And then obviously the example given, like, showed me how the handshake works really, really well. 

 

Frances Kleven: And just the example was that the customer in leadership training, they do a lot of in-person sessions, and were thinking, “Could we use an avatar as prep for those sessions to get out the nerves for people in doing role play? Could we create more interaction with the avatar that then had a more valuable and more impactful interaction with when you were working with humans?” 

 

Caroline Hynes: Exactly, yeah, build that early context. Get that role play. Do it in a real, in a safe way where you’re able to kind of fumble and be vulnerable. And it’s not another human, ironically. Yeah. So I found a home for it in my heart and mind. So it was good. 

 

Frances Kleven: And then Brendan, you were on the other side of, “Hey, I think this is something that’s important in the market. I think it’s something that we’re seeing”. So what were your thoughts around it? 

 

Brendan Noud: Yeah. I think somewhat similar to Caroline, I probably have gone on a journey on the whole avatar saying, when I first saw them, I was plain amused and I’m just on websites and stuff, I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” I was just like, so cool the technology and the improvement over the last couple of years in terms of lip sync, all of that kind of stuff, and just the mannerisms. But then, I think it’s after 60 seconds, I’m like, “Okay, this is actually starting to get grating for me.” No matter how good you do find it’s not a human, and so I struggled with them. I could see the salesperson in me, could see how this will demo really well. Prospects will be interested in this. But from a practical perspective, I was like, “I’m not sure people will want to actually use these across their teams from a practical perspective.” But similar to Caroline, the more you see the different ways people learn and the different types of learning, like what you do — some people just wanna read, some people want to listen to a podcast, some people want their interactive e-learning course — I can see how scenarios and avatars fit into that. And for certain types of learning and that kind of coaching role play, it does give you that kind of safe space as you say, to go try things. Again, I could see myself in my own role, where if I’m prepping for something or a conversation or whatever, in the past I would call up one of my colleagues and go, “Can I try run this with you? I have to have a difficult conversation. I haven’t done this before,” and take their day and my day and go through that. Whereas I can now realistically see myself, if I could go and have that with an avatar, I think it could be beneficial. So yeah, it’s one of those things where it’s really cool technology, which I love that, but then is it just kind of cool and gimmicky, or is there a practical application of it? And I’m definitely in the — which is why we’re excited — to plow in there and bring that technology to our customers. And it’ll keep evolving, and it’ll keep improving. And, again, the more we talk to our customers, and they tell us about their plans and how they want to use this technology it helps us evolve and build a better platform. 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah. And for me, it goes back to something I value so much at LearnUpon: we don’t just jump on technology bandwagon or trend. We really want what we build to add value to our product whether that’s AI or anything else. 

 

Brendan Noud: We were saying with Skills…

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, exactly, right? So I just think having those debates and being really transparent about how we’re thinking about technology just ultimately helps add more value for the customer at the end of the day.

 

Frances Kleven: I was thinking, I changed my mind or my thinking around avatars — it was actually a customer of ours who presented at our conference, who was talking about… she’s in enablement, customer and employee enablement, and that she built an agent to really be herself, but to scale across her team. So she couldn’t be on every call, she couldn’t be in every coaching session, and so built an agent to give the answers she would give to a sales rep, and I thought about that, being a manager, of your value as a manager is your knowledge, experience, your coaching, your in-person feedback, but you can’t scale that in every situation. And so if a really smart avatar that you built to give the answers you would give, that you’ve trained to give the feedback you would give, is quite powerful. 

 

Brendan Noud: I think that’s the thing as well, where we’ve kind of moved from almost these pre-programmed avatars that kind of had stock answers right the way through to this idea. And again, how we’re thinking about from a LearnUpon perspective is the true context of the learner. So it isn’t one-size-fits-all. We actually know who you are. If it’s a sales rep or a manager or whatever it is in there, we know who they are, we know what their strengths and weaknesses are, we know where they need coaching and enablement. So to be able to have the avatars have that context. They also know our methodology, our culture code, our tone of voice. So it moves from this grating, generic talking-head to actually a proper engaging role-play scenario.

 

Caroline Hynes: I’m looking forward to on-demand Frances. 

 

Frances Kleven: No, yeah, but I think about that, and I think what would that mean if the person on my team, a customer success manager on my team, had access to the answer that I would give? It does mean a shift in where I would spend my time. It’s quite a significant amount of time to train an agent that way. And you’re constantly training and correcting and updating. And our customer Birdie, she talked about that. That’s her job, to constantly be telling an agent, “This isn’t correct. That’s not what I would say.” So there’s a shift. But I think, “Oh, right, I didn’t spend two hours catching up on Slack this morning. I spent two hours training my agent.” 

 

Brendan Noud: But it’s a multiplier effect then. It’s this idea of shifting where you spend your energy. So instead of you spending it where you would’ve in the past, you now spend it training your agent. But then it can be, as I say, pushed out and scaled right across all the CSMs at LearnUpon or out to our customers potentially. 

 

Caroline Hynes: And I guess finding the boundary, like with my people hat on. Like having the people. It’s like finding the boundary for how far we go with that and understanding when it’s really helpful and when it’s more helpful to have the person, right? It really unlocks your time and your team’s ability to get more answers quickly, I suppose as well. 

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. Brendan, you mentioned one of your aha moments with AI was when you trialed Corseau, which is now Create+ in our platform. And because you would’ve seen so much instructional design and authoring tools and I would imagine had some skepticism about what AI could do in that. And I think for me, I had the same reaction of “I didn’t expect this.” But talk a little bit about on the content creation side, similar to the avatar, you now can scale and create content in seconds, but there is a real opportunity for that content to be at a higher quality and to be more personalized even when it’s being done in seconds. 

 

Brendan Noud: Yeah, that’s it. I was saying to you previously, Frances, it was really interesting where having looked at, oh, I don’t know how many authoring tools over the years, lots and lots and going from the ones that are really powerful and build really good content but very complex to use, to the kind of lighter ones but maybe the depth of content isn’t there and that first time trialing Corseau and going through — and I’m not an instructional designer — I think that was almost what I loved about it. I didn’t have to spend so long kind of figuring out, “Okay, how do I build like a rudimentary course here?” It walked me through. It literally was my co-pilot, and it took me through that kind of instructional design process to build a pretty good course, if I do say so myself. 

 

Caroline Hynes: What did you build on, Brendan? 

 

Brendan Noud: Manchester United. Yeah, for me, again, it was… ‘Cause this is an area, since we started LearnUpon, myself and Des are… I guess our first passion has always been the delivery. And that’s what we really wanted to have an impact on, when we started LearnUpon. But we’ve obviously, again, seen the importance of content creation and delivery coming together and being like two sides of the same coin I guess. And so for me to be literally being blown away kind of seeing what that could impact. And then I was like, “Okay, that’s me. I’m not an instructional designer.”  I remember I sent it to Aisling, our Head of L&D, the next day and I was like, “Have a look at this and see what you think.” And when Aisling came back and was like, “This is really cool. How can we get it?” I think that’s when I got onto Des and Derek and said, “How can we hopefully make Corso become part of the LearnUpon family?” And it was really interesting to see, for someone like Aisling and talking to her about the impact that for her was like, it got her 90% of the way. You know, 85 to 90% really quickly, and then she could actually use her time to go get this to where it needs to be, to be prime time. And just the acceleration there, the pace at which content is changing enablement across LearnUpon, it’s so quick. Like Aisling and our team, they could never keep up before a time where we have Create+ — what is now Create+. 

 

Frances Kleven: And I think keeping up, and then I think on the customer education side, we’re always just looking for the middle ground for the audience that we needed to create a course for. But now can create a course and say, “Create this for a beginner, novice LearnUpon user without a lot of LMS experience,” and then create another course for a power user with the right tone and the right information, or even create this for someone who uses LearnUpon to train their employees versus their customers, and we could never do that before. And so this idea of personalization is interesting because I think we worry about losing personalization in an agentic era, which is fair, but we also then have to acknowledge we never had personalization really before. We were doing the best that we could in the time that we had, but nothing was highly personalized. Caroline, I think when your team first showed me the agentic learning journeys, I was skeptical too. But also, as they started walking me through, it reminded me of Brendan’s experience with Create+ where it was asking me the right questions and for input at the time that I wanted to give that input, that I wanted to, “Wait, wait, wait. Don’t move forward yet. I wanna double-check that. Wait, I want to provide some input there.” And so that thinking you can see rolled out into those agentic learning journeys as well. 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, absolutely. And I say this a lot, but it’s important: we have the agentic learning agent, but you also have the ability to go in and correct yourself and manually still do it. So even though we’re bringing a huge amount of efficiency and removing a load of complexity by being able to do it through natural language… so those super power users who still like to go in and feel that they’ve got control over the journey, they can still go in and do that. So I think that’s really important. But showing the thinking, asking the questions, the sanity-checking along the way, it makes it feel really, really safe. We have customers who build out very complex journeys. And I think it just gives a little bit of breathing room for them to be like, “Okay, this is gonna be okay.” 

 

Frances Kleven: And then also to have the ability to quickly just ask, “Is all of this correct? Is all of this…” I think testing and iterating had been so challenging because you didn’t have maybe the time to properly test or the resources to properly test, and now you can do that so quickly. 

 

Caroline Hynes: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 

 

Frances Kleven: So as we’re wrapping up, I wanted to end with, in some ways, a call to action or some advice to listeners: if you’re working in L&D, whether you’re training your customers or your employees or your members, what’s something that, starting today, you should embrace or that you should immediately go in action? And it doesn’t have to be something that is transformational. It could just be what’s the next step as you move into thinking about agentic learning and how you become an architect of that. So Brendan, for you, what’s one thing that you would suggest that they do? 

 

Brendan Noud: I think maybe a lot of our listeners are already doing this, but if not, I would strongly recommend, I think, go to your Chief People Officer or whoever the relevant person is in your company, and ask them, “What does the org chart for the company, this organization, look like in 12 months’ time? What are the job roles, and what are the skills and competencies that we would expect for those roles?” And the answers probably won’t all be there. I know from a LearnUpon perspective, I’m asking my team this, and I think in some areas it’s more concrete than others. But I think starting that thought process, and then, from my perspective as an L&D leader, you can start to think about what do your learning journeys of the future look like, you know, how are you going to close those skills and competencies, and prepare the workforce and the organization for the inevitable change that’s coming. So yeah, I think that’s where I would focus.

 

Frances Kleven: I would say if you’re in customer education too, the same applies: speak to your VP of Customer Experience, because there’s a similar shift happening there. 

 

Brendan Noud: And your VP of Product. Because your product is going to be very different in 12 months’ time. And so the learner experience from the customer experience, and the customer journey is going to be very different. And learning and how we enable and deploy learning throughout that customer experience is going to be more important than ever. So yeah, certainly have those conversations. Having them and having them regularly, ’cause it will change. 

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. And I think make that conversation…not casual conversation, but it doesn’t need to be a formal memo of requesting what does this team look like. Those are the human conversations we should be having. So Caroline, for you, what’s something people should embrace or? 

 

Caroline Hynes: I’ll take a more philosophical approach. So I think L&D and everybody in organizations should kind of embrace the fear ’cause it is scary. And people are worried about what does a role look like, where are they gonna be adding value, what work are they going to do, and be the change maker. Use the technology, learn, experiment, and then as you start to see gaps, look and see what’s the things you’ve got on your to-do list or the strategy, what the impact you’re trying to drive, and really lean into that side of things. But it does take a bit of getting uncomfortable, and I’ve been through that, through all the technology shifts that I’ve been through. But I do think there’s a little bit of  acknowledging, it’s strange, it can be scary and that’s okay. We’re all actually going through it, and we’re not all talking about it, and some of us are a little bit more chest out and we’re like, “I got this,” and some of us are a little bit more tentative. Maybe just trust yourself and embrace it. 

 

Frances Kleven: And I think, uh, my advice building on that is make sure to share the things that you’re doing, and to say, “Look, we have used a new tool to create content, and we’ve been able to create 10 courses in a month versus one course in a month, and these courses are relevant to these business goals or these outcomes.” I think learning professionals are incredibly humble, and I think sometimes happier to stay under the radar, but this is really the time to be outspoken about your innovation and what you’re doing and achieving, even if it doesn’t maybe have the results you expected. But I think that’s the expectation now of these roles, that you are trying new things, that you are discovering new efficiencies, new strategies. 

 

Caroline Hynes: Something that the L&D team unlock by using, like, a LearnUpon platform as you are leveraging it, you can bring to another part of your organization. I mean, it should definitely be arms out and not arms around. 100% share. We are all, we are all learning. 

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah. Share the learnings. I think that’s what we do best, right, in the learning field. Well, this has been such a fun conversation. I know we could probably spend all morning having this conversation, so look forward to speaking to you on future episodes, and thank you so much for your time. 

 

Caroline Hynes: Thanks, Frances. 

 

Brendan Noud: Thanks, Frances. 

 

Frances Kleven: Cheers. Thanks so much for joining this conversation where we really grappled with some difficult questions about what is the human input and human need in the agentic era. We’ve been delighted to have you. We look forward to you joining our next episodes, and keep an eye out on our podcast page when the new ones launch.